Good Morning Lowcountry

No mo' GMLc

GMLc is leaving the hammock at the end of this week and moving to the P&C's Community News desk, where we hope you, dear reader, will continue to send news, pictures, goings-on and Lowcountry observations.

A bunch of editors started this daily column in 2000 and shared its writing. Since 2004, GMLc Proper has been writing it full-time.

We thank you for your almost constant e-mails and letters to GMLc from every pocket of the Lowcountry, as well as foreign places like the Isle of Man and Illinois.

Community News is extra news from your area inside the Local & State section you are holding twice a week on Wednesdays and Fridays. Your Lowcountry sections — specific to Charleston, Berkeley, Dorchester and East Cooper — are in your paper every Thursday. Send your stuff to hmcleod@postandcourier.com and we'll try to find a place for it.

Meanwhile, the end of this week is your last chance to talk back to GMLc (be nice!).

Reader Wess Leitch of Wadmalaw Island has a head start. He wrote to talk about Robert Smalls, the late South Carolina militia man and legislator who in 1862, as a 23-year-old slave, commandeered a Confederate transport steamer and sailed it out of Charleston Harbor to freedom.

"There is an excellent historical novel on this subject, 'Fragments of the Ark' by Louise Meriwether," he said. "She did a tremendous amount of research. Available on Amazon and Barnes &Noble."

Thanks, Mr. Leitch. We'll check it out.

Open-air flowers

GMLc wishes the Lowcountry had a daily, open-air flower market ... like Savannah's, although we'd never trade our own coastal breeze for Savannah's humidity. Anyway, fresh flowers are considered a necessity in some places ... such as France, where les francaise often pick them, or pick them up at the flower market, daily on the way home from work.

Fortunately, much of the Lowcountry is an open-air flower market, the parts that aren't pluff mud and parking lots. We have a lot of green space, both contained in parks and spreading in a vast marshscape.

Our favorite story in the paper today is on Page 1B. Thanks to a $9 million endowment from Darla Moore, the newly formed Charleston Parks Conservancy will work with the city and volunteers in a grassroots movement to preserve, tend and beautify the city's green spaces.

GMLc requests more plumbago, more Confederate jasmine and Carolina jessamine and more of that bright yellow-green leafy plant that sprouts from window boxes on Vendue Range.

But we digress, and we have only a few more inches to bring you this PSA:

Goodwill, one of GMLc's favorite good causes, will open a new Community Service Center on Monday. The center will include a JobLink Center, GoodPeople Staffing and housing for several different human service providers.

The JobLink Center will offer job searches, resume help, career counseling and job training opportunities. Goodwill also plans to provide services such as basic literacy, GED prep, GED testing, English as a second language and financial literacy training.

The new center is at 2150 Eagle Drive, Building 100 , off Rivers Avenue just behind Carey Hilliard's. For more info, see www.palmettogoodwill.org.

GMLc

Call 937-5564. Write gmlc@postandcourier.com. Comment at www.charleston.net/news/gmlc.